Write all your thoughts and feelings in a journal. Don’t hold back.

“So I wrote. I wrote my pain, my thoughts, letters to people who would never read them. I remember that after about a week of starting it, I woke up in the middle of the night, having the urge to burn that journal. The emotions that I had poured into it were too real, too raw, and I wanted it to go away. [...] I realised that it helped me put my feelings into words, and accept what I was feeling... because there is no backspace. There is no delete. When I wrote it, I made it real and therefore acknowledged it.”

“My journalling “style” is just writing my stream of thoughts on paper without any breaks. I don’t keep paragraph breaks or maintain any structure. [...] My notebook is only for myself and for the time I’m writing in it. I don’t make it pretty or readable. When I’m writing, all that I focus on is what is going on in my mind. I try to write as fast as I can to capture my thoughts and make sense out of them. As my writing is not as fast as my mind, I’m forced to slow down my thinking a bit which makes me notice every thought more. My handwriting absolutely sucks but that doesn’t matter.”

“I wrote before bed, usually the synopsis of my school day. When I had a horrible tiff at home, I’d layer my diary with feelings, then finish each page off with one-liners in all caps. I felt like my favorite character from the Judy Blume book. I’d found a friend who would listen to me; a friend who knew me better than anyone else, a friend I could tell everything to, a friend I could trust.”